Guilt By Association: The Strange Case of the Oshry Sisters

Four social media stars have been fired from their television show after the revelation that Pamela Gellar is their mother.

Earlier in the week, presumably through some aggregator, I came across an odd Daily Beast article titled “The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller.”

Claudia, Jackie, Olivia, and Margo Oshry are a group of sisters in New York living the millennial dream, running viral Instagram accounts and ruthlessly curating their online images.

Claudia, the most famous of the bunch, is better known online as Girl With No Job. After graduating from NYU in 2016 and lamenting about her desire to avoid a traditional office job, she began running several viral social-media accounts full-time under the pseudonym Girl With No Job. Now, she makes a living sharing funny memes and stolen tweets to her nearly 3 million Instagram followers.

Jackie runs a Twitter account and Instagram known as Jackie O Problems, a nod to the wife of President John F. Kennedy, where she shares memes, jokes about Bravo TV stars, and lots of selfies. Margo is responsible for the food-porn Instagram account @hungoverandhungry, which has racked up more than 100,000 followers. Olivia acts as the “momager,” overseeing a YouTube and Facebook Live show that Claudia and Jackie host call “The Morning Breath.”

All four girls travel in a pack, obsessively retweeting each other, posting photos of themselves while talking about the importance of family.

“The only thing I love more than America is my family. Happy fifth everyone!” Jackie tweeted in 2014, linking to a since-deleted Instagram post.

But there is one family member in particular who is conspicuously absent from the Oshry sisters’ social-media posts: their mother, the anti-Islam activist, hate-monger, and diehard Trump supporter Pamela Geller.

The story goes on at some length from there but that’s the gist of it. Geller’s daughters, seemingly independently of her, have built a significant following on social media. Yet, not at all shockingly given the animus directed at her mother, they’ve gone out of their way to not mention her name or show her pictures.

To which my reaction was: So?

The sisters Oshry are not in the politics space. They don’t take a position on Islam, terrorism, or other controversial matters that made their mother famous. They apparently enjoy a fine relationship with her but, completely understandably, have wanted to make their names on their own and, one presumes, not have to answer for their mom’s politics.

So why is that a problem? Why is the Daily Beast outing them in public?

I thought about posting all that at the time but, rather than pile on to the attention to what seemed a complete non-story, I decided not to.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, an Oath spokesperson said the company would cancel the program and launch an investigation into The Morning Breath, which stars the Oshry sisters, who are popular Instagram personalities better known as GirlWithNoJob and JackieOProblems.

“The Morning Breath, an Oath social-media show, is being canceled immediately and we have launched an internal investigation and will take other appropriate steps based on the results of the investigation,” the spokesperson said.

The representative also said officials are looking into whether the girls would remain employed at Oath, the company formed when Yahoo and AOL merged last year.

What the ever-loving hell?

I had been completely unaware of the Oshry girls until the first story broke—aside from some minor controversy over Pam posting some pics of herself and one of them in a bikini back in the dark ages of blogging—and have no opinion on their merits as show hosts. Nor, I must confess, could I have told you what Oath was until reading the last sentence in the blockquoted text above. But it’s simply outrageous to cancel a program on the sole basis that its stars, who got there on their own merits, are related to someone whose views the company doesn’t like.

Even stranger, the girls took pains to distance themselves from said views:

In a statement following Wednesday’s story, Claudia Oshry implied that the girls did not share their mother’s anti-Muslim beliefs.

“We want to be clear to our audience and fans that our political and cultural beliefs are not anti-Muslim or anti-anyone,” she said. “Our views are separate from our mother’s. Being raised by a single parent, we were taught to make our own choices based on our personal beliefs. We are inspired to think for ourselves and we do. We do not condone discrimination or racist beliefs of any kind.”

Now, there’s other information later in the piece contending that the sisters had generated some animosity among other Oath employees by association with some fringe Republican officials, unprofessional work habits, and the like. Fine. But it’s pretty clear that the firing was the result of the revelation the day before of their mother.

@Davebo: It’s truly a bizarre notion to me that the girls should be branded based on who their mother is—especially since they’d already established a brand. Whether they were insufficiently hard-working is a different matter but it doesn’t seem the proximate cause of the firing; indeed, the executive who fired them was praising them to the heavens last month.

I read that in the DBeast and had about the same reactions that you describe. I wondered what the heck is ‘Oath’ and what are these young women actually doing to become – famous? – and why would anyone care. I assumed it was about as meaningful as the Kardashians with a dash of last decade’s political color.

If they’ve been deprived of a livelihood because someone found out that their mother is a nut-case, well, that’s a damn shame. But it’s not as if they had studied for years to become some sort of professional and then have lost that for a similar reason. My outrage was kind of tempered.

@Davebo: It’s not about the mother. This writer didn’t get all the facts. It has come to light that the Oshry sisters have said things against Germans, Muslims, and Homosexuals. Not just on twitter but on their show too.

Last I looked even though Trump and his numerous supporters have tried to suppress it the 1st Amendment was still in force. Thus, the mother has a right to her opinion and it should be recognized it is her opinion. I do not agree with her opinion but all should note it is hers not her daughters. Thus they should not be held accountable for their mothers opinion.

“#Obama is #muslim!!!! Ya I said it,” she wrote in May 2012.
“I can’t help but feel like I’m funding terrorism when I take a cab,” she tweeted in January 2014.

Another sister:

Olivia — who is described as keeping “the lowest profile of all the Oshry sisters… [avoiding] posting about Trump and politics completely”— shared a photo of all four sisters with then New York mayoral candidate Bo Dietl, who had previously admitted to racist statements and using the N-word, according to BuzzFeed. (They also endorsed him in the caption.)
Bo Dietl is a stone cold racist, he used to be on Imus’ show in all his bigoted glory.

Can’t find them but Jackie Oshry apologized for her tweets.

the apple did not fall far from the tree. This isn’t a First Amendment issue, this is a company making a business decision not to promote a show featuring a couple of young women who happen to be racists, and they have the tweets to prove it.

@Senyordave: No, not this time, Senor. If I had a distant uncle who was an SS officer, could I be fired for that? And I once said that he seemed like a nice guy? I don’t think so.
Somebody would wind up in court.

@Tyrell:..more pc nonsense…
I do not know the terms of their employment however if they were waged employees they could have been employed “at will”. Basically this means that an employer can terminate an employee with no notice for no reason. This works both ways. “At will” employees can quit with no notice for no reason.
Employees and employers enter into this arrangement knowing full well what the terms are.

@JohnMcC: I think I’m pretty much on the same page. If they’d been fired from an actual job, I might have a bit more sympathy. But when it comes to celebrity, who you are, and who you’re related to can be a very relevant factor … many people are (or become) famous at least in part because of who they are related to. No reason it shouldn’t work the other way too.

James- Who is their audience? I don’t know squat about Oath and never heard of these people before, just like you. I think this sort of stinks. However, if their target audience is under 25, people are going to go looking for evidence that they believe the same things her mother does. From the citations above, it looks like they are finding them. So, does Oath wait for the show to crumble or outright fire them? What would you do if you were running the business?

@Todd:
One of the reasons I tell young writers not to go to fame for your metric of success. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to your audience. What’s the upside? Better tables at restaurants? Comped drinks? And in return you put your life in the hands of fickle strangers and abandon privacy?

Money. That’s the metric. Money is real, and it does real things, and it’s yours.

I keep on hearing that this Jordan Peterson guy has the bestselling book on Amazon, along with stuff about interviews where he says that women who wear makeup and heels deserve to be sexually harassed. Oddly enough, no one cares because of the money.

I refuse to know anything about social media/youtube stars, but I find it hard to believe that any ‘brand’ based on not-famous people doing something online has any sort of resilience. I also don’t think there’s a niche for dumb social memes done by people who tweet anti-Muslim jokes. You could just as well have the dumb social memes by someone who isn’t racist. Whereas Peterson has the angry/creepy white male niche, which allows for misogyny.

It’s a business decision, nothing more. These girls are products (by their own creation), and the company in question expected to sell them to a buying audience. Bad PR = bad for business, and like it or not, in the digital age even a tangential association like this can be deadly .

This company exists to do one thing – create value for its shareholders – and that involves ruthlessly protecting the bottom line. It’s not a charity or a public service project. You protect your bottom line by jettisoning threats to it. It’s really that simple.

There’s a huger reason why they kept their association with their mother secret, one no one likes to talk about.

On May 3, 2015, two Muslim extremists drove from Arizona to Garland, Texas where Geller was attending an exhibit of cartoons of Mohammed. They pulled up and started shooting, wounding a security officer before a Garland police officer shot and killed both of them.

The FBI had been monitoring the two extremists for a couple of years, and even had an even had an undercover agent following and videotaping the two, even getting the entire shootout on video.

At no point did the FBI try to stop the two on their assassination trip. They did not warn Geller, the event organizers, or even the Garland police that the would-be assassins were coming. And their agent just watched the whole thing unfold, making sure to get the whole thing on video.

Then, in June 2015, another Muslim plotted to fly to Geller and behead her, but got impatient and instead attacked a couple of Boston cops.

So these four young women found a way to make a living without leveraging their mother’s fame, and are not overly interested in getting on the radar of the crazies who have already made one serious attempt to kill her.

But they said some mean things, so let’s make sure the whole world knows how to find Geller’s daughters. Sure, it would be bad if anything happened to them, but check the above comments — they kinda had it coming. They haven’t really done anything, but LOOK WHAT THEY SAID!!!!

Huh. I had a lengthy comment here, discussing the May 2015 attempted assassination of Geller in Garland, Texas by two Muslim extremists — an attack that the FBI actually had an agent present for who recorded the whole thing, but did absolutely nothing to prevent — and it apparently disappeared.

Given that and other credible threats against Geller, it’s no surprise that her children might not want to publicly identify with her and possibly paint targets on themselves.

But it turns out they’ve said some un-nice things, though, so I guess that makes it OK to doxx them.

@HarvardLaw92: I didn’t mention Goldberg’s role because I don’t see the relevance. You can’t “incite” two people to travel hundreds of miles to assassinate someone unless they were already inclined to commit murder.

And as far as ” the vast majority of us don’t like extremists of any flavor,” get back to me when extremist hate-mongers like Linda Sarsour or Louis Farrakhan are socially toxic.

I also missed your strident denunciations of Antifa when they demonstrated their commitment to opposing fascism by dressing up in black, wearing masks, and beating the living hell out of people who said things they didn’t like. Guess I wasn’t paying attention enough.

Just be honest for once. You don’t like “extremists” as long as you can define them as right-wing. Which means that any right-wingers who actually act like they believe in their beliefs are, by definition, “extremists,” while left-wing extremists simply don’t exist.

These young women can easily escape the shame ghetto they now find themselves in.

1. Find a talk show.
2. Cry.
3. Don’t pretend cry. (Well, actually, you can pretend cry, but “cry” like you mean it. Audience perception is the key factor.)
4. Ask for forgiveness (I’m not sure why you have to actually ask for forgiveness for being someone’s daughter, but those are the rules!)
5. Profit!

Seriously, along with Wikipedia, and Snopes.com, Urban Dictionary may be the most long lasting *useful* internet thingy.

(You know what is not useful? My GD spell-checker. In the previous paragraph, the idiot thing ascertained that “Wikipedia” is not an actual word. Did you mean “Pediatric”? And Snopes.com got mangled as “Synopsizes”. And “internet” should be all caps “INTERNET” like this was 1991 and you were Al Gore’s adorkable tiny little nerdy baby!

And any AI that refuses to acknowledge “thingy” as a word is useless.)

Yes, up to and including deleting old anti-Muslim tweets of theirs. Daughters should not pay for the sins of the mother, but sometimes the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

Jackie has apologized for the “indefensible comments I’ve said in the past” and I am all about 2nd chances especially for things people do in their teens/early 20’s, but has to look no further than the White House to see what happens when a person doesn’t have to suffer any consequences for their actions.

There are worse things then slipping into a life of anonymity. This is hardly the end of their world.

And James, I hate you for this post. Up until now I was blissfully ignorant of all things sister Oshry, but you made me google them and now I am in need of a brain wipe.

@HarvardLaw92: Please, elaborate how “egged on by an internet troll” somehow is a TOTALLY CRITICAL aspect of a story of two Muslim extremists traveling over 1,000 miles to assassinate someone who says mean things about Islam, while the FBI — fully aware of the assassination plot — does absolutely nothing except have their undercover agent videotape the whole botched attempt.

Be sure to go into great detail about how these two men were perfectly innocent, totally non-violent Muslims until the big mean ol’ internet troll somehow brainwashed them into acting like… well, like a whole bunch of other Muslims around the world who totally lose their… stuff… when someone dares insult their precious Prophet. I’m also curious how this troll (and his superhuman powers) persuaded the FBI to just stand back and watch while this attempted murder plot unfolded.

Yes, up to and including deleting old anti-Muslim tweets of theirs. Daughters should not pay for the sins of the mother, but sometimes the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

Jackie has apologized for the “indefensible comments I’ve said in the past” and I am all about 2nd chances especially for things people do in their teens/early 20’s, but has to look no further than the White House to see what happens when a person doesn’t have to suffer any consequences for their actions.

There are worse things then slipping into a life of anonymity. This is hardly the end of their world.

And James, I hate you for this post. Up until now I was blissfully ignorant of all things sister Oshry, but you made me google them and now I am in need of a brain wipe.

As I made rather explicit in the OP, I had literally never heard of these girls, their show, or even Oath before the first story broke a few days back. I read about it in that story, on The Daily Beast. I then read their fellow-up. TDB is a rather well-established journalistic outlet with a left-of-center take; it’s not Breitbart, by any means. But I don’t have an investigative team to see whether there are additional facts in the case. I comment on what I have to go on, usually the linked/quoted pieces, and make it clear if—as was the case there—I’m approaching a topic without personal knowledge beyond the reports.

As also noted in the OP, the first TDB piece colored my reaction. It seemed beyond the pale to put out a hit piece on teenagers on the sole basis that their mother in an anti-Islamist agitator. It wasn’t, “Here’s a bunch of horrible things the girls have said on their show/social media. And it shouldn’t be surprising given who their mother is.” It was literally, “Their mother is horrible and they’re hiding it. Busted!”

@OzarkHillbilly: If the girls also said a lot of stupid things on the Internet, that may well change circumstances. Live by the Tweet, die by the Tweet. But that wasn’t what TDB was reporting. I don’t care about the fate of the show one whit.

@James Joyner: And bad on the Daily Beast who were more concerned with getting an incomplete click driving story on their website then they were with getting the complete and accurate story up. Not an unusual occurrence these days. (unsure how often this happens at the DB because I rarely go there) All too often when I find a story… somewhat inadequate, I will do a google search or even wait a day or 2 for more details to emerge. Inevitably, those missing details do show up.

Of all the instances of injustice that happened yesterday you chose to highlight the fate of the Oshry young women.

Was The Daily Beast piece bad? Wow! Really, really bad. Kids are not on the hook for the parents sins. And the “Busted!” angle was just such a bad editorial decision. The reporter should be fired and the editor should be fired and the person who is responsible for telling the tech girl to go ahead and click on the “Publish” button should be fired. (It was probably also the story editor who was the culprit because amongst web publishers an actual Managing Editor is seen as wasted salary.)

The Daily Beast has been diminished because of the reaction to the Oshry kids story. Even if they tweeted inflammatory and racist crap three years ago, I.DO.NOT.CARE.

The reason for my

this whole story is just Breitbart-level agitprop.

was not a throw-away line. I was trying to send a message. You are in effect the Managing Editor here.

You have a special site here with OTB. You own a unicorn. OTB “takes” are regularly featured on Memeorandom with a link back to here.

There are a hundred “I’m outraged about what some rando Lefty said somewhere yesterday. Grr!” sites. Michelle Malkin will bury you if you even try to invade on her turf.

This OP and the South Africa story yesterday indicate that you are susceptible to right wing agitprop. Resist that urge.

There are a hundred “I’m outraged about what some rando Lefty said somewhere yesterday. Grr!” sites. Michelle Malkin will bury you if you even try to invade on her turf.

This OP and the South Africa story yesterday indicate that you are susceptible to right wing agitprop. Resist that urge.

While I appreciate your intent here, I don’t think either are examples of my falling for right-wing agitprop.

As I learn more via the comment thread, I think I fell for a bad take from TDB. But TDB is a reasonably respected left-of-center site. I was literally reacting to their two stories, which I found via Memeorandum or some similar source, not jumping on a right-wing bandwagon railing against TDB. That is, I was taking TDB seriously as a journalistic outlet and perplexed by the story they were peddling in the first instance and then with what seemed like an overreaction to that story by Oath. And, honestly, I don’t think either the headline or the piece here were even slightly inflammatory, much less railing against some ominious Left.

While the early days of OTB had a lot of pile-on stories, I long ago decided that “Known Idiot Says Something Stupid” was not a regular feature I wanted at OTB. For awhile, I had an “Outrage of the Day” category but it was always ironic: the outrage people were piling on wasn’t actually that outrageous. And, indeed, one reason my blogging flagged in the first year or so of the Trump presidency was that daily, let alone multiple-times-daily, posts pointing out what a lout and ignoramus he was quickly grew tiresome.

Similarly, the South Africa story was driven, as was clear from the posting, by Dave Schuler’s picking up the New Zealand newspaper’s report. Dave is incredibly thoughtful, well-read, and a self-described Scoop Jackson Democrat.

As noted at the top of that piece, I don’t follow South Africa much on a daily basis anymore. But my sense for awhile has been that, post-Mandela, the country has slowly been going down an all-too-familiar path in the neighborhood. My headline reflected the three reports linked in the post and my take on the sheer math of the vote. But I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the grassroots of South African politics.

I appreciate your nuanced response because I rhetorically (but, hopefully, respectfully and responsibly) just kicked you in the nuts with my last comment (tried to, anyway. That was my intent.).

Up front, I just have to acknowledge that this is your joint and you can publish whatever you choose to whenever and however you choose.

But I also like being a guest here. I like the joint. You and Steven and Doug have interesting and smart and even sometimes deep takes on current events. You possess the best commenter gaggle (that’s actually a noun) in the world.

I don’t think it’s any mystery – the continuing anxiety about the unknowns of Brexit, now coupled with the added anxiety surrounding Nimrod’s looming trade war, are being priced into the market.

If you’re a market watcher, I’d be watching (and shorting) Boeing. No one company is, even remotely, as in the crosshairs with regard to China and this looming trade war as Boeing. Of the top ten US companies doing business in China, Boeing is the only non-consumer, non-tech outfit in the bunch. China was already looking for an opportunity to grab market share with its own domestically produced alternative – the C919, aimed squarely at the 737 / A320 market. China is, by far, Boeing’s largest growth market, and Trump just gave the Chinese the excuse they needed to save face while doing something that they wanted to do anyway – supplant Boeing sales.

The US market has priced in – thus far anyway – an uncertainty correction of close to $600 billion since nimrod announced this latest stunt. Factor in the inflation and rising interest rates which will almost certainly follow in the wake of a trade war, coupled with a market which is still (even with the corrections) IMO at an irrational high, and I suspect we’re just seeing the opening rumblings of what will be much worse to come.

Yeah, I got that. I’m just saying the unicorn isn’t in any danger here. My reactions to a story from TDB that seems to mirror yours and to a post from Dave Schuler are not signs of me falling for right-wing agitprop or even pursuing clickbait.

Similarly, the South Africa story was driven, as was clear from the posting, by Dave Schuler’s picking up the New Zealand newspaper’s report. Dave is incredibly thoughtful, well-read, and a self-described Scoop Jackson Democrat.

That’s just super.

Face it, there was a reason for the SA “land grab”story and the headline you chose to hang on it and it was definitely not Dave Shuler’s sterling reputation as a reporter and analyst.

Post-apartheid SA will play out just like Mugabe era Rhodesia Zimbabwe. Is that the hypothesis?

I mean, the front page excerpt and article subhead said, “Under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, the country made a smooth transition from apartheid. Now it’s going the way of Zimbabwe.” Do I think things will play out exactly the same way? One hopes not. But things are definitely moving in a familiar direction.

@HarvardLaw92: Funny how your FIRST response isn’t “shut up and go away.” It’s almost like you wanted to make sure my points were discounted first, before people realized they actually were germane.

Believe me, I understand why the attempted assassination of Pamela Geller is a subject you really, really don’t want brought up. Much like the attempted mass assassination of Congressional Republicans, the rampant violence of the Occupy movement, and the rampant violence of the laughably-termed “Antifa” fascists, you don’t want anyone to think about inconvenient facts that contradict your narrative — that it’s the right wing that is the source of all political violence and political threats. Worse, it might lead to people seeing people on the right as people, people who are occasionally the victims of political violence, and you can’t have them be humanized.

Geller was the victim of an actual assassination attempt by Muslim extremists (yes, ones egged on by some internet troll, but they still did try to assassinate her). And yes, the FBI was aware of the plan and chose to do nothing to stop it, or even warn anyone of the plot.

And it was in that context that the Daily Beast chose to “out” her daughters, who had established their separate public personas. And even if they had — among all the other public things they said — had said some unkind things about certain protected classes, what purpose was served by revealing their connection to Geller than to deprive them of their independently-established public identities AND paint a huge target on them for the people who are already devoutly interested in killing their mother?